DOCSLIB.ORG

The Germanic Third Weak Class

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text

Load more

THE GERMANIC THIRD WEAK CLASS JAY H. JASANOFF Harvard University Germanic verbs of the 3rd weak class form presents characterized by an alternation between predesinential *ai (e.g. Go. 3sg. habai1» and *a (e.g. Ipl. habam). These verbs are usually compared with the 'e-verbs' of Italic and Balto­ Slavic, but no IE present built on the stative suffix *-e- will account phonologi­ cally for the form of the suffix in Germanic. Instead, it can be shown that the characteristic Germanic paradigm results from the 'activization' of an older middle paradigm in which a 3sg. in *-ai « IE *-oi; cf. Skt. duh~ 'milks') was further suffixed by the productive active ending *-Pi « IE *-ti). 1. The inflection of the third class of weak verbs (exemplified by the verb 'to have': Gothic haban, Old Norse hafa,! Old High German hab~, Old Saxon hebbian, Old English habban) presents one of the classic problems in the historical morphology of Germanic. Not only do the verbs of this class show peculiarities in all the older Germanic languages, but they differ remarkably in their conjugation from one language to another, so that it is not at all obvious how the Common Germanic paradigm should be reconstructed. Given this diversity of forms, we will do well to begin with a short review of the morphological facts themselves. The situation is simplest in Old High German. The entire conjugation of hab~n is athematic (to the extent that this term still has any meaning), and is based on the single stem hab~-: 1sg. hab~, 3sg. hab~t, 3pl. hab~t, impv. 2sg. habe, opt. 3sg. habe, hab2e, prete 1sg. hab~ta, pres. pte. hab~ti, past pte. gihab2t. Except for the e of the stem, this paradigm is completely parallel to that of a 2nd class weak verb like 8alb~ 'anoint' (lsg. salbOm, 3sg. salb,jt, like habhn, hab~t etc.) The resemblance between the two classes extends to at least one set of forms which cannot be old. These are the longer optatives 3sg. hab2e, salb,je, 2sg. hab22s, salb62s etc., which seem to have been created analogically. The genesis of this formation, which will not concern us further in this paper, is discussed by Cowgill (1959: 11-12). The OHG pattern is not found in any other Germanic language. In Gothic the corresponding verb haban exhibits a systematic opposition between stem forms habai- (phonetically probably [habE· -]) and haba-. To the habai- group belong 2sg. habais, 3sg. habaijJ, 2pl. habaijJ, the corresponding imperatives (2sg. habai etc.), the weak preterit 1-3sg. habaida etc., and the past pte. habaijJs. The rest of the paradigm is indistinguishable from that of a normal strong verb: 1sg. haba, Ipl. habam, 3pl. haband (with impv. 3pl. habandau), opt. lsg. habau, 3sg. habai, passive 1-3sg. habada etc., pres. pte. habands. The Gothic alternation of stems hahai- and haba- is not completely isolated. It recurs almost exactly in Old Norse, where a typical 3rd class weak verb, vaka 'wake', is conjugated in the pres. 1 Here and below, 'Old Norse' will be understood to mean'Old Icelandic' unless other­ wise specified. This paper has benefited greatlyfrom extended discussions with Calvert Watkins, Warren Cowgill, Patrick Hollifield, and F. Roger Higgins. Needless to say, responsibility for errors is entirely my own. 850 THE GERMANIC THIRD WEAK CLASS 851 indic. as lsg. vaki, 2-3sg. vakir, Ipl. vQkum, 2pI. vaki'O, 3pl. vaka. Except for lag. vaki, each term is directly equatable with its Gothic counterpart; and vaki itself is almost certainly an analogical form, created to conform to the otherwise regular pattern lsg. = 3sg. minus -r (cf. 3sg. grefr 'digs', 1sg. gref; 3sg. heyrir 'hears', lsg. heyri). In the other moods and tenses the picture is the same, Old Norse in general showing forms in -i- < older *-e- < *-ai- where Gothic has -ai- (e.g. impv. sg. vaki, syncopated prete vakoa), and forms in -a- where Gothic has ·a- (e.g. info vaka, pres. ptc. vakandi). This inflection is documented in North Germanic from the 7th century; cf. the archaic runic compound wita(n)daha­ laiban 'protector of the bread', semantically parallel to OE hlajord 'bread-guard, lord'. (For ON hafa, segja 'say', and jJegja 'be silent', see §3 below). The greatest complexity is found in Old Saxon and Old English. In both lan­ guages, the 3rd weak class is a mere vestige of a category, the great majority of originally 3rd class verbs having been absorbed into the productive 2nd, or o-class. Old Saxon has carried this development to an extreme, and only two verbs, hebbian 'have' and seggian 'say', are usually considered to represent the unmixed type.2 Their inflection is characterized by an alternation between a stem in -e­ (or -a-), from older *-e- < *-ai-, and a stem in -ja-. The forms in -e- correspond in distribution to the -ai- forms of Gothic (e.g. 2sg. hobes, habas, 3sg. habed, habad) with the significant exception of the short preterit l-3sg. habda and the matching ptc. gihabd, which have the appearance of archaisms. The remaining forms, cor­ responding to those with the simple thematic vowel in Gothic, show general agreement with the 1st weak class: 1sg. hebbiu, pI. hebbiad, opt. 1sg. hebbie, pres. pte. *hebbiandi (cf. libbiandi 'living'), info hebbian; to these must be added the umlauted forms hahbiu, hahbiad etc., which occur with considerable frequency in the Monacensis manuscript of the Heliand. The situation is very similar in Old English. Habban, secgan 'say', and one or two others follow a paradigm essen­ tially identical to that of Old Saxon; the relevant West Saxon forms of habban (the absence of umlaut is no doubt secondary) are lsg. luebbe, 2sg. hcEjst, 3sg. "heefp, pI. habbap, opt. 1sg. hEebbe, pres. ptc. luebbende, info habban, prete l-3sg. ha3jde, past ptc. (3e-)ha3jd. In a number of other verbs, however, Old English has introduced a regularized paradigm (type Anglian lif3an 'live', 1sg. lijJe) which has no counterpart in Old Saxon. This type appears to have been created analogically on thebasis of the inherited 2sg. and 3sg. forms with *e stem vocalism (earlier *ai). It is itself subject to replacement by the productive 2nd class (cl. Cowgill 1959: 13-14). Although it displays an extraordinary degree of paradigmatic diversity in the older Germanic languages, the 3rd class is not a late category. Its archaic charac­ ter can be seen from the fact that a significant number of 3rd class verbs corre­ spond outside Germanic to formations built on a late IE deverbative suffix *-e-: typical examples are OHG dagen 'be silent', Lat. tacere; Go. witan 'watch', Lat. videre 'see', OCS videti, Lith. pavydeti 'envy' (both < *'ljide-, with the Balto­ Slavic lengthened zero-grade discussed by Kurylowicz 1956:291-3); OHG dolht 'suffer', Lith. tyleti 'be silent'; OHG haben, Lat. habere (from parallel roots J OS libbian 'live' already represents a significant departure from the pattern of hebbian and seggian. I t is discussed in §4, below. 852 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 49, NUMBER 4 (1973) *kap- and *ghabh-). This suffix, in which a 'stative' value is usually clearly recognizable, has enjoyed considerable productivity in a central group of IE languages comprising Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, and Greek. It is very prob­ ably related to a homonymous suffix *-e-, equally well-established in IE but somewhat less prominent in Germanic, which serves to derive stative and in­ choative verbs from nouns and adjectives. Denominative 3rd class verbs are synchronically important only in OHG, but their IE pedigree is assured by the important word equation OHG rothl, 'turn red', Lith. rudeti 'rust', Russian Church Slavic r1Jdeti s~ 'blush', OIr ·ruidi 'blush', Lat. rubere 'be red', all pre­ supposing a verbal stem *rudh-e- < adj. *rudh-ro- (cf. Watkins 1972). It is hardly surprising that scholars have been virtually unanimous in connecting both Germanic types with the 'e-verbs' of other IE traditions. But while the fact of the relationship has been universally admitted, there has been very little agreement on how the morphological details of the Germanic situation are to be explained. Accordingly, it will not be amiss to survey a few of the IE and Pre-Germanic formations most commonly assumed to have played a role in the prehistory of the 3rd class. ATHEMATIC PRESENTS IN *-e-. The OHG inflection hab~, -~s, -~t etc. suggests the possibility of an inherited athematic present in *-e-mi, *-e-si, *-e-ti. Such a formation is actually found in Hittite verbs of the denominative type (e.g. dannattet 'became empty', dannattas 'empty'; cf. Watkins 1972) and may lie at the root of a Lat. 3pl. like lucent 'shine' < *-enti if this is not simply analogical. But while perfectly acceptable from an IE standpoint, the hypothesis of an athematic e-conjugation is not easy to reconcile with the Germanic forms. The view that OHG hab~t continues a Common Germanic *habejJ(i)3 has most re­ cently been argued, and with considerable resQurcefulness, by Polome (1967:83­ 92), who is quite correct in noting that there are no insurmountable obstacles to his theory as far as West Germanic is concerned. On the other hand, his iden­ tification of *habejJ(i) as the source of Go. habaijJ seems wrong, and leaves the simple thematic forms haba, habam, haband unexplained.4 Perhaps the most telling objection to his view is the state of affairs in Old Saxon: Why, if Old Saxon in­ herited 1sg. *haben < *-em, did it replace this form by the wholly irregular hebbiu while retaining-jf not actually creating-the parallel 1sg. salbon in the second class? It seems more likely that 1sg.
Recommended publications
  • An Automatic Part-Of-Speech Tagger for Middle Low German

    An Automatic Part-Of-Speech Tagger for Middle Low German

    An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German Mariya Koleva, Melissa Farasyn, Bart Desmet, Anne Breitbarth and Véronique Hoste Ghent University Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them. Keywords: historical linguistics, part-of-speech tagging, conditional random fields, feature selection, normalization 1. Introduction Corpora of historical texts annotated with different levels of grammatical information, such as parts of speech, (inflectional) morphology, syntactic chunks, clausal syntax, provide an important resource for studies of diachronic syntactic variation and change (e.g. Kroch et al. 2000, Rögnvaldsson & Helgadóttir 2011). They enable the automatic extraction of syntactic information from historical texts (more than is manually possible), and allow making statistically valid observations. Apart from reducing the amount of time required for data retrieval, an important advantage is that they make research testable and replicable. The Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG) (Breitbarth et al.
  • The English Language

    The English Language

    The English Language Version 5.0 Eala ðu lareow, tæce me sum ðing. [Aelfric, Grammar] Prof. Dr. Russell Block University of Applied Sciences - München Department 13 – General Studies Winter Semester 2008 © 2008 by Russell Block Um eine gute Note in der Klausur zu erzielen genügt es nicht, dieses Skript zu lesen. Sie müssen auch die “Show” sehen! Dieses Skript ist der Entwurf eines Buches: The English Language – A Guide for Inquisitive Students. Nur der Stoff, der in der Vorlesung behandelt wird, ist prüfungsrelevant. Unit 1: Language as a system ................................................8 1 Introduction ...................................... ...................8 2 A simple example of structure ..................... ......................8 Unit 2: The English sound system ...........................................10 3 Introduction..................................... ...................10 4 Standard dialects ................................ ....................10 5 The major differences between German and English . ......................10 5.1 The consonants ................................. ..............10 5.2 Overview of the English consonants . ..................10 5.3 Tense vs. lax .................................. ...............11 5.4 The final devoicing rule ....................... .................12 5.5 The “th”-sounds ................................ ..............12 5.6 The “sh”-sound .................................. ............. 12 5.7 The voiced sounds / Z/ and / dZ / ...................................12 5.8 The
  • 6 X 10.Long New.P65

    6 X 10.Long New.P65

    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-61803-8 - German: A Linguistic Introduction Sarah M. B. Fagan Index More information Index abbreviation 102, 258–260 analytic language 111n.45, 199 ablaut 57, 75, 80, 88, 97, 107, 113n.72, 186 anaphor 142 (Der) Abrogans 188 Anglo-Americanism 275–276 A.c.I. construction 143 antonymy 150–152 acronym 102–104 apex 12 address, forms of 252–255 approximant 13, 48n.6 in FWG 270 arytenoid cartilages 4–5, 50n.36, 211n.15 history of 252–253 aspect 153–155 adjective 90, 116, 119, 259 habitual 122, 155 attributive 71, 110n.33, 124 imperfective 153–154 and case 120–122 perfective 153 comparative form 71, 150–151, 190 progressive 155, 161–163, 216 inflection of 70–75 aspiration 11, 21, 23–24, 49n.16, 184–185, predicative 71–72, 110n.33, 111n.35, 241n.1 124–125 Aspiration (rule) 23–24 strong endings 72 assimilation 21, 26, 190, 248 superlative form 71, 111n.35 in colloquial German 246 weak endings 72–73 see also Nasal Assimilation, Velar Fricative see also compound Assimilation, voicing assimilation adjective phrase 63, 124–125, 193–194 Auslautverhartung¨ , see Final Fortition extended 125, 278n.10 Auslautsgesetze (laws of finals) 212n.33 adjunct 128 Austrian Standard German (ASG) 224–228 adjunction 135–136, 141–142 grammar 226–227 adverb 92, 116, 124–126, 141–142, 146n.15, legal language 279n.21 250–251; see also compound pronunciation 225–226 adverb phrase 124–126, 176–177 vocabulary 227–228 affix 55–56, 99, 106, 212n.29 auxiliary verb 85, 113n.78, 116, 129, 197, 199, derivational 90, 108n.3 251, 270 inflectional 56,
  • The Shared Lexicon of Baltic, Slavic and Germanic

    The Shared Lexicon of Baltic, Slavic and Germanic

    THE SHARED LEXICON OF BALTIC, SLAVIC AND GERMANIC VINCENT F. VAN DER HEIJDEN ******** Thesis for the Master Comparative Indo-European Linguistics under supervision of prof.dr. A.M. Lubotsky Universiteit Leiden, 2018 Table of contents 1. Introduction 2 2. Background topics 3 2.1. Non-lexical similarities between Baltic, Slavic and Germanic 3 2.2. The Prehistory of Balto-Slavic and Germanic 3 2.2.1. Northwestern Indo-European 3 2.2.2. The Origins of Baltic, Slavic and Germanic 4 2.3. Possible substrates in Balto-Slavic and Germanic 6 2.3.1. Hunter-gatherer languages 6 2.3.2. Neolithic languages 7 2.3.3. The Corded Ware culture 7 2.3.4. Temematic 7 2.3.5. Uralic 9 2.4. Recapitulation 9 3. The shared lexicon of Baltic, Slavic and Germanic 11 3.1. Forms that belong to the shared lexicon 11 3.1.1. Baltic-Slavic-Germanic forms 11 3.1.2. Baltic-Germanic forms 19 3.1.3. Slavic-Germanic forms 24 3.2. Forms that do not belong to the shared lexicon 27 3.2.1. Indo-European forms 27 3.2.2. Forms restricted to Europe 32 3.2.3. Possible Germanic borrowings into Baltic and Slavic 40 3.2.4. Uncertain forms and invalid comparisons 42 4. Analysis 48 4.1. Morphology of the forms 49 4.2. Semantics of the forms 49 4.2.1. Natural terms 49 4.2.2. Cultural terms 50 4.3. Origin of the forms 52 5. Conclusion 54 Abbreviations 56 Bibliography 57 1 1.
  • New Arguments for Verb Cluster Formation at PF and a Right-Branching VP

    New Arguments for Verb Cluster Formation at PF and a Right-Branching VP

    New arguments for verb cluster formation at PF and a right-branching VP. Evidence from verb doubling and cluster penetrability* version October 12, 2013; to appear in Linguistic Variation Martin Salzmann, University of Leipzig ([email protected]) Abstract This paper provides new evidence that verb cluster formation in West Germanic takes place post- syntactically. Contrary to some previous accounts, I argue that cluster formation involves linearly adjacent morphosyntactic words and not syntactic sister nodes. The empirical evidence is drawn from Swiss German verb doubling constructions where intriguing asymmetries arise between ascending and descending orders. The approach additionally solves the cluster puzzle with extraposition and topicalization, generates all of the crosslinguistically attested six orders in the verbal complex and correctly predicts which orders are penetrable in which positions. On a more general level, the paper provides arguments for a derivational treatment of verb cluster formation and order variation and adduces important evidence in favor of a right-branching VP. 1 Introduction: Verb clusters in West Germanic In this section I will briefly lay out the central properties of West-Germanic verb clusters. Given the vast literature, I will confine myself to the aspects that will play a role in the ensuing discussion. For a detailed survey both over facts and analyses, the reader is referred to Wurmbrand (2005). West Germanic OV-languages are famous for their verb clusters, i.e. the phenomenon that the verbal elements of a clause all occur together clause-finally (under verb second, where the finite verb moves to C, only the non-finite verbs occur together).
  • CHAPTER SEVENTEEN History of the German Language 1 Indo

    CHAPTER SEVENTEEN History of the German Language 1 Indo

    CHAPTER SEVENTEEN History of the German Language 1 Indo-European and Germanic Background Indo-European Background It has already been mentioned in this course that German and English are related languages. Two languages can be related to each other in much the same way that two people can be related to each other. If two people share a common ancestor, say their mother or their great-grandfather, then they are genetically related. Similarly, German and English are genetically related because they share a common ancestor, a language which was spoken in what is now northern Germany sometime before the Angles and the Saxons migrated to England. We do not have written records of this language, unfortunately, but we have a good idea of what it must have looked and sounded like. We have arrived at our conclusions as to what it looked and sounded like by comparing the sounds of words and morphemes in earlier written stages of English and German (and Dutch) and in modern-day English and German dialects. As a result of the comparisons we are able to reconstruct what the original language, called a proto-language, must have been like. This particular proto-language is usually referred to as Proto-West Germanic. The method of reconstruction based on comparison is called the comparative method. If faced with two languages the comparative method can tell us one of three things: 1) the two languages are related in that both are descended from a common ancestor, e.g. German and English, 2) the two are related in that one is the ancestor of the other, e.g.
  • Teaching English-Spanish Cognates Using the Texas 2X2 Picture Book Reading Lists

    Teaching English-Spanish Cognates Using the Texas 2X2 Picture Book Reading Lists

    TEACHING ENGLISH-SPANISH COGNATES USING THE TEXAS 2X2 PICTURE BOOK READING LISTS JOSÉ A. MONTELONGO, ANITA C. HERNÁNDEZ, & ROBERTA J. HERTER ABSTRACT English-Spanish cognates are words that possess identical or nearly identical spellings and meanings in both English and Spanish as a result of being derived mainly from Latin and Greek. Of major importance is the fact that many of the more than 20,000 cognates in English are academic vocabulary words, terms essential for comprehending school texts. The Texas 2x2 Reading List is a list of recommended reading books for children ranging in ages from pre-school to the early primary grades. The list is published yearly by the Children’s Round Table, a division of the Texas Library Association. The books that comprise the Texas 2x2 Reading List are a rich source of vocabulary and contain many English-Spanish cognates. Teachers can use the Texas 2x2 picture books to create a cognate vocabulary lesson that can be taught as a companion to a picture book read- aloud. The purpose of this paper is to present some of the different types of cognate vocabulary lessons that may be created to accompany a picture book read-aloud. The lessons are based on the morphological and spelling regularities between English and Spanish cognates and can be used to teach students how to convert words from one language to another. Examples of the different types of regularities and the Texas 2x2 books that contain them are included, as is an example cognate vocabulary lesson plan to accompany the picture book, Oddrey (Whamond, 2012).
  • A Penn-Style Treebank of Middle Low German

    A Penn-Style Treebank of Middle Low German

    A Penn-style Treebank of Middle Low German Hannah Booth Joint work with Anne Breitbarth, Aaron Ecay & Melissa Farasyn Ghent University 12th December, 2019 1 / 47 Context I Diachronic parsed corpora now exist for a range of languages: I English (Taylor et al., 2003; Kroch & Taylor, 2000) I Icelandic (Wallenberg et al., 2011) I French (Martineau et al., 2010) I Portuguese (Galves et al., 2017) I Irish (Lash, 2014) I Have greatly enhanced our understanding of syntactic change: I Quantitative studies of syntactic phenomena over time I Findings which have a strong empirical basis and are (somewhat) reproducible 2 / 47 Context I Corpus of Historical Low German (‘CHLG’) I Anne Breitbarth (Gent) I Sheila Watts (Cambridge) I George Walkden (Konstanz) I Parsed corpus spanning: I Old Low German/Old Saxon (c.800-1050) I Middle Low German (c.1250-1600) I OLG component already available: HeliPaD (Walkden, 2016) I 46,067 words I Heliand text I MLG component currently under development 3 / 47 What is Middle Low German? I MLG = West Germanic scribal dialects in Northern Germany and North-Eastern Netherlands 4 / 47 What is Middle Low German? I The rise and fall of (written) Low German I Pre-800: pre-historical I c.800-1050: Old Low German/Old Saxon I c.1050-1250 Attestation gap (Latin) I c.1250-1370: Early MLG I c.1370-1520: ‘Classical MLG’ (Golden Age) I c.1520-1850: transition to HG as in written domain I c.1850-today: transition to HG in spoken domain 5 / 47 What is Middle Low German? I Hanseatic League: alliance between North German towns and trade outposts abroad to promote economic and diplomatic interests (13th-15th centuries) 6 / 47 What is Middle Low German? I LG served as lingua franca for supraregional communication I High prestige across North Sea and Baltic regions I Associated with trade and economic prosperity I Linguistic legacy I Huge amounts of linguistic borrowings in e.g.
  • Old Frisian, an Introduction To

    Old Frisian, an Introduction To

    An Introduction to Old Frisian An Introduction to Old Frisian History, Grammar, Reader, Glossary Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. University of Leiden John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bremmer, Rolf H. (Rolf Hendrik), 1950- An introduction to Old Frisian : history, grammar, reader, glossary / Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Frisian language--To 1500--Grammar. 2. Frisian language--To 1500--History. 3. Frisian language--To 1550--Texts. I. Title. PF1421.B74 2009 439’.2--dc22 2008045390 isbn 978 90 272 3255 7 (Hb; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 3256 4 (Pb; alk. paper) © 2009 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Table of contents Preface ix chapter i History: The when, where and what of Old Frisian 1 The Frisians. A short history (§§1–8); Texts and manuscripts (§§9–14); Language (§§15–18); The scope of Old Frisian studies (§§19–21) chapter ii Phonology: The sounds of Old Frisian 21 A. Introductory remarks (§§22–27): Spelling and pronunciation (§§22–23); Axioms and method (§§24–25); West Germanic vowel inventory (§26); A common West Germanic sound-change: gemination (§27) B.
  • Nonnative Acquisition of Verb Second: on the Empirical Underpinnings of Universal L2 Claims

    Nonnative Acquisition of Verb Second: on the Empirical Underpinnings of Universal L2 Claims

    Nonnative acquisition of Verb Second: On the empirical underpinnings of universal L2 claims Ute Bohnacker Lund University Abstract Acquiring Germanic verb second is typically described as difficult for second-language learners. Even speakers of a V2-language (Swedish) learning another V2-language (German) are said not to transfer V2 but to start with a non-V2 grammar, following a universal developmental path of verb placement. The present study contests this claim, documenting early targetlike V2 production for 6 Swedish ab-initio (and 23 intermediate) learners of German, at a time when their interlanguage syntax elsewhere is nontargetlike (head-initial VPs). Learners whose only nonnative language is German never violate V2, indicating transfer of V2-L1 syntax. Informants with previous knowledge of English are less targetlike in their L3-German productions, indicating interference from non-V2 English. V2 per se is thus not universally difficult for nonnative learners. in press in: Marcel den Dikken & Christina Tortora, eds., 2005. The function of function words and functional categories. [Series: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today] Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins (pp. 41-77). Nonnative acquisition of Verb Second: On the empirical underpinnings of universal L2 claims Ute Bohnacker Lund University 1. Introduction This paper investigates the acquisition of verb placement, especially verb second (V2), by native Swedish adults and teenagers learning German. Several recent publications (e.g. Platzack 1996, 2001; Pienemann 1998; Pienemann & Håkansson 1999; Håkansson, Pienemann & Sayehli 2002) have claimed that learners, irrespective of their first language (L1), take the same developmental route in the acquisition of syntax of a foreign or second language (L2).
  • The Origins of Old English Morphology

    The Origins of Old English Morphology

    Englisches Seminar der Universitat¨ Zurich¨ The Origins of Old English Morphology Hausarbeit der Philosophischen Fakultat¨ der Universitat¨ Zurich¨ im Fach Englische Sprachwissenschaft Referentin: Prof. Dr. Gunnel Tottie Stefan Hofler¨ Wiesenbachstrasse 7a CH-9015 St. Gallen +41 71 / 310 16 65 shoefl[email protected] Zurich,¨ 26. September 2002 Contents Symbols and abbreviations 3 1 Introduction 5 2 Aim and scope 5 3 Literature 6 4 Background: Comparative Indo-European linguistics 7 4.1 Old English in the Indo-European language family . 7 4.1.1 The Indo-European language family and the development of comparative Indo-European linguistics . 7 4.1.2 The Germanic language family . 9 4.1.3 The earliest attestation of Germanic . 10 4.2 Linguistic reconstruction . 11 4.2.1 Internal and external reconstruction . 11 4.2.2 Sound laws . 12 4.2.3 Analogy . 13 5 Conditions of the evolution of Old English morphology 14 5.1 Accent and stress . 14 5.2 Major sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to Old English . 15 5.2.1 Sound changes in stressed syllables . 15 5.2.2 Sound changes in weak syllables . 16 5.3 Morphophonemics . 17 5.3.1 Ablaut . 17 5.3.2 PIE root structure and the laryngeals . 18 6 Exemplification 20 6.1 Noun inflection . 20 6.1.1 a-Stems . 21 6.1.2 o¯ -Stems . 22 6.1.3 i-Stems . 23 6.1.4 u-Stems . 23 6.1.5 n-Stems . 24 1 6.1.6 Consonant stems and minor declensions . 24 6.2 Verb inflection . 25 6.2.1 Strong verbs .
  • And *- in Germanic

    And *- in Germanic

    Archaisms and innovations four interconnected studies on Germanic historical phonology and morphology Hansen, Bjarne Simmelkjær Sandgaard Publication date: 2014 Document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Citation for published version (APA): Hansen, B. S. S. (2014). Archaisms and innovations: four interconnected studies on Germanic historical phonology and morphology. Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Download date: 27. sep.. 2021 FACULTY OF HUMANITIE S UNIVERSITY OF COPENH AGEN Ph .D. thesis Bjarne Simmelkjær Sandgaard Hansen Archaisms and innovations four interconnected studies on Germanic historical phonology and morphology i Contents LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................... V 1. Grammatical terms ....................................................................................................................................................... v 2. Linguanyms .................................................................................................................................................................. vi 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 5 1.1. Archaisms and innovations ....................................................................................................................................... 6 1.2. Aim and purpose of the present thesis ....................................................................................................................